I've been doing some new research on Paris as I want to do an article on L'Ange Blanc. My resources are limited to one French newspaper, but even so I've been able to piece together a good amount of information and I thought I'd share some of it here to provide some context for the French catch TV bouts. I''ll use this post by @ohtani's jacketas a starting point:
Not sure about how things were when Andre made his debut a few years later, but in the late 1950s wrestling was shown on TV typically around 10 p.m. Usually after 10 p.m., but sometimes a little before. It wasn't a fixed timeslot. And like in later years, it wasn't shows just by one promotion either.
Henri Deglane did retire in 1950, but then returned in October 1954. The interesting thing about his comeback, which lasted through February 1955, was that he was no longer working with promoter Raoul Paoli (who at the time was running shows at Palais des Sports, Cirque d'Hiver and Central, with Alex Goldstein as his matchmaker). Instead Deglane was working for Henri Chausson at Elysee Montmartre. During this time Deglane was critical of Paoli/Goldstein and tag team wrestling, which Paoli/Goldstein had just introduced in France (Felix Miquet & Francois Miquet vs. Eddie Brush & Jack Wentworth at Palais des Sports on November 1, 1954, being the very first tag match in France). Deglane thought tag team wrestling would, and I quote, "completely demonetize wrestling". Obviously, it didn't. Far from it.
The wrestling venues in Paris in 1958 and 1959 were Palais des Sports (a.k.a. Velodrome d'Hiver), Salle Wagram, Elysee Montmartre, Cirque d'Hiver, Central, Stadium, Palais de la Mutualite, Lancry Arena, and Salle des fetes de Clichy. Palais des Sports was the biggest one (capacity being around 18,000) and Paoli/Goldstein would do shows there bi-weekly, from around September through May, and then take a break in the summer. They had four other venues - Cirque d'Hiver, Central, Stadium and Lancry Arena. Most of these were running weekly. Then you had Salle Wagram (another weekly venue), which was using a completely different group of wrestlers and was kind of running in opposition to the Paoli/Goldstein crew. Typically, you wouldn't see Wagram wrestlers on Paoli cards and vice versa. And then there was Chausson's Elysee Montmartre, which would often host two weekly shows and use talent from both of the other groups.
Here's what a typical month of wrestling in Paris looked like in 1959. I'm posting only the line-ups, because I don't have the results. The main event is listed first. As you can see, quite the busy schedule. And you have to remember, this is just Paris. There was a lot of wrestling going on elsewhere in France too, but Paris was the center of it all. Here's February 1959, which saw 29 wrestling shows take place in Paris:
As far as the masked guys were concerned, L'Homme Masque was the first one to pop up on the scene. That was at Palais des Sports in December 1958. Then came L'Ange Blanc (Francisco Pino) in early January 1959 at Cirque d'Hiver (in other words, both masked characters were introduced by the Paoli/Goldstein group). Pino had been wrestling as himself in midcard matches at Elysee Montmartre for about a month, then took about three weeks off, and then he appeared as the masked hero L'Ange Blanc. He was a major hit straight away. The newspaper I'm using for the research says that L'Ange Blanc's television appearance where he vowed to put all the bad guys (les méchants) in their place was viewed by 4 million viewers, which is a huge number for the time (in fact, that number equates to about 9% of the entire population of France back then).
L'Homme Masque may have been the first, but Blanc was the one who truly kicked off mask-a-mania in France. A number of new masked characters started popping up on the Paris scene over the next several months. Most important among them was Le Bourreau de Bethune (Jacques Ducrez), who first appeared in early February 1959. What was interesting about him was that he was the first masked character that wasn't introduced by the Paoli/Goldstein promotion. He was a Salle Wagram attraction. And right away he, along with others from Salle Wagram, began hurling challenges at L'Ange Blanc. Bourreau is remembered as L'Ange Blanc's biggest rival, and they did eventually work with each other, but initially they were working for different promotions and had nothing to do with each other, other than the occasional cross-promotional challenges. L'Ange Blanc's other big masked rival, and one who was actually working for the same promotion as him, was L'Homme Masque. The two had a big match at Palais des Sports in May (in what may have been the final wrestling event at the venue), wrestled each other all over the country, and eventually it was after a match with L'Homme Masque in March 1961 when L'Ange Blanc unmasked.
Other masked characters who popped up in Paris during the first half of 1959 were Mr. X, Superman, Le Justicier Blanc (Jean Fryziuk at first, and then Tony Oliver), and Mysterman (Karl Gotch). What's interesting is that in most of the cases the identities of the masked wrestlers were exposed in the press very quickly. L'Ange Blanc got exposed a few weeks after his initial appearance, Bourreau de Bethune's identity was revealed the day of his debut, Justicier and Mysterman were revealed pretty quickly too. This didn't seem to hurt the appeal of the characters much, but I was surprised to see them getting exposed in the French press so quickly. The press must've had an insider feeding them info, IMO.
